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From a Daughter to All Black Dads: Open Up to Us
Whether it’s mental health or other struggles, your hard work informs our own
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
“The one thing I don’t want,” my father said, “is for you to finish your Ph.D. how I finished mine: broken.”
Until that moment, commiserating with me about the difficulties of research, I’d never realized that he’d taken 14 years to complete his medical degree and his PhD. Everyone I’ve met who knew father has always used a descriptor like “intelligent” or “strong” — but I’m not sure how many of them know that he suffered with mental illness, or that he was open with his family about it. Or, especially, that he asked for help.
My father wasn’t perfect — far from it — but there was no one who knew it more than him.
There isn’t a day that goes by in the nearly four years since my father passed away that I don’t think of him. Some days, I find myself talking out loud to him and laughing; others, I weep as though my grief is still fresh. The one constant, though, remains the pride I feel for the person he fought to become, and the final version of the man he was the day…
